The Irish Novel 1960 - 2010

1984: Desmond Hogan, A Curious Street

1984 Desmond Hogan, A Curious Street A leading member of the generation of Irish writers to emerge in the 1970s, Hogan (b. 1951) is the author of five novels, including The Ikon Maker (1976), The Leaves on Grey (1980), A New Shirt (1986) and A Farewell to Prague (1995). A native of Ballinasloe, County Galway, and a connoisseur of small-town repression, he may be best known for his short stories, of which he has published a number of collections. His work is distinguished by a compressed, highly coloured style and by characters who are outsiders with refined sensibilities. Hogan has also written plays and a collection of non-fiction. From a brief newspaper report, Jeremy Hitchins, a British soldier serving in Northern Ireland, learns that Alan Mulvanney has killed himself. Jeremy never actually knew Alan, and the suicide did not take place in Northern Ireland but in the victim’s native Athlone, ‘the meanest town in Ireland’ (182). But the two are significantly connected. For one thing, their emotional histories are linked. Jeremy’s mother, Eileen Carmody, had an innocent, sisterly relationship with Alan in her young days. At another level, Jeremy has long felt himself drawn to Alan, finding in his story qualities sadly lacking from the world in which he grows up. Among these qualities are integrity and imagination, and these strike Jeremy as being all the more valuable in view of Alan’s suffering both from mental illness and from the lovelessness and isolation to which post-war provincial Ireland condemns his homosexuality. As well as possessing the qualities in question, Alan has honoured them by writing a novel in which they are the primary motives of action. The novel was written while Alan was a student in Dublin in the 1940s. Entitled A Cavalier Against Time, it tells of a young couple who in 1649, the year Cromwell landed in Ireland, travelled the country on a white horse preaching peace and love – a doomed project which left the lovers estranged and in exile. But their failure is not the point. What matters is that the gesture has been made. And the same applies to the novel itself, which is also from a worldly point of view a failure because, once completed, Alan consigns it to his bottom drawer. By declining publication, he has preserved the novel’s integrity as a statement of resistance and as a declaration of difference. And he did this at a time when the official mood in Ireland seemed determined to deny resistance and eliminate difference. The same disposition 86 THE IRISH NOVEL 1960–2010 might describe Cromwell’s Irish policy, as both A Cavalier Against Time and A Curious Street make clear – Alan Mulvanney’s novel acting as a lens through which the experiences of the characters in A Curious Street may be perceived. Alan’s narrative is the prototype of the unavailability of peace and love. That is also the story of Jeremy Hitchins’s Ireland, and of his own personal history. The deprivation, heartbreak and victimhood with which A Curious Street is suffused are inherited from the dire scenarios of the Mulvanney text. Their recurrence in a modern context is both a critique of, and a homage to, the mystique and singularity of A Cavalier Against Time. The real work and the imagined one are both distinct and inseparable, like Narcissus and his reflection. Their closeness is additionally emphasised by the modern characters living in the same towns as their avatars. And A Curious Street is set in the general Shannonside area which was a principal crossing-point for those dispossessed Irish being driven by Cromwell’s campaign into an impoverished western domicile. It seems inevitable that the ancestors of Cherine, one of Jeremy’s friends, ‘had been uprooted in Cromwell’s time’ (37), and indeed many of the characters share a destiny of dislocation and restlessness , foremost among them Eileen Carmody. It is modern youth, however, who to a person are least at home, marked through no fault of their own by a heritage whose distortions have had a disabling effect on their personalities. The cumulative nature of this inheritance is indicated by the tendency of A Curious Street to proceed not by plot development as such but by means of a layered succession of many stories – of parents and other family members, of teachers, of peripheral characters, of battles long ago. Almost without exception, all these testify to the spiritual impoverishment, the sexual abnegation and the...